Autofiction @ Link Wanderlust

I stumbled across two stories on autofiction, the new genre that is becoming a staple on everyone’s TBR list.

If you fancy a craftily curated memoir, you are a fan of autofiction, the novel where the author uses his or her life as the framework of the novel. The term ‘autofiction’ has a story behind it. It was coined in a blurb of Serge Doubrovsky’s book Fils in the late 1970s and focuses more on the author’s alter ego than his or her immediate memory. The resultant book could be a self-help module as we see how the author deals with a variety of situations that could or need not be fictional. Have you read books by authors of this genre? Some of them include Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti.

Auto-fiction seems to be the novel of the now- these fragmented times when people who are literate and have access to smartphones frame their entire lives around the social network world online. These novels tell the truth by telling lies; the authors come forward with all the might of their fictional selves and invent or deconstruct reality as we now know it. It’s not as straightforward as it seems and writers face many roadblocks when it comes to style of writing and identity issues. More and more women and queer writers are making their voices heard. Critics, however, do not approve of this selfie-oriented departure from the traditional novel. Do you agree with them?